Is There Still
7
"You're late."
The cloaked figure didn't surprise Danny, nor did the admonition. "You knew I would be."
Clockwork smiled at Danny, a genuine smile at the halfa's spunk, and shifted into his infantile state. "True. I did, but I didn't expect you to wait so long before seeking me out." He paused, smirking. "You always do prefer learning things the hard way."
Danny shrugged as he floated toward the ancient Time Master. "I'm a teenager. Is there any other way?" He stopped then, mere feet away from the other ghost, close enough that when he grew into a wizened figure the chill of ghost energy rushed across him. He'd never noticed it before. Of course, he'd never been a full ghost before.
"You know why I'm here," Danny said quietly as he contemplated the viewing portal that Clockwork had obviously been studying before Danny had arrived.
It wasn't aimed to anything in particular, in fact, Danny was surprised to see it randomly flashing images of everything from clouds drifting lazily across a pale blue sky, to a flipping, flopping mass of grunion on a beach trying to continue their species before gasping and dying in the lack of water. He thought it curious at first, that a ghost with as much power, with the kinds of responsibilities that Clockwork must have, that he would spend time taking in these mundane and inane scrap of life.
But no, it made perfect sense when it came down to it. Sure, destiny could be changed in the course of one epic moment—he was proof of that wasn't he? First becoming a halfa, then stopping himself from destroying the world. But life, yes, life, was made up of the small moments. The chirp of a cricket, the laughter of a friend. Stammered and fervent denials of affection.
That was life, what Danny had fought so hard to protect. Perhaps only the life of his town. But he was only one person, one boy. One ghost. At least he had tried. Maybe he had failed in the end, hurt more people than need be. But he had tried. And that had to count for something, didn't it?
Another rush of energy and Clockwork was back in his middle aged form, the one that Danny was most comfortable with, and he shot a glance at the Time Master, trying not to sigh.
"It was inevitable, Danny," Clockwork finally said, his staff caged between his hands as he leaned against it, gazing at the portal that now showed a field of yellow flowers bursting into blood at warp speed, then suddenly drying and beginning to wilt.
Danny clenched his jaw, feeling the ache as his teeth ground against each other. "Yeah," he shot back bitterly. "From the day that Vlad became a halfa."
Danny nearly dropped from his perch in the air as Clockwork said, "No, from the day you became a halfa."
"W-what?" he stammered out in disbelief, so sure was he that the responsibility for the inevitability of his fate was in Vlad Masters' hands.
"Are you familiar with the concept of fate, Danny?" the now ancient ghost asked, startling Danny as he realized he hadn't even noticed the shifts the other ghost had been making.
"Yeah. Sort of," Danny said, then shrugged. "I know about the mythology of the fates. You know, one for the life thread, one to call the time, one to cut it with the scissors. Didn't they have one eye between them?"
Clockwork chuckled. "You're crossing your Greek mythology with Disney," he told the younger ghost as he directed his attention to the portal with a wave of his time staff. "Fate, Danny, is a mutable force. Powerful once set on a single course of action, but it can be changed."
The portal flickered for a moment and then settled on an image of a much younger Danny, standing in front of his parents' ghost portal, Sam and Tucker behind him, watching eagerly as he took that first fateful step into the portal, then a second that caught his foot on some exposed wiring, sending him tripping forward to stop dead still as Clockwork froze the image of the past where Danny could stare at it, blue eyes sad as he memorized the day he had died, and had lived.
"That day, that accident, was fate, Danny. It was inevitable."
"You said fate was mutable," Danny whispered back woodenly, one hand absently rubbing the emblem Sam had made for him where it lay across his chest.
"I did," Clockwork said as he pointed a finger to the foot tangled in the cords, ripples from his contact at the surface as the image spreading and making Danny dizzy and nauseous as he watched it. "There is your mutability. Your foot, in the chords, making you trip and trigger the on button, yes?"
"So?" Danny shrugged back.
"I know that you are familiar with electricity and the concept of grounding a current. Imagine, had you not tripped over those rubber coated wires, had one tangled around your leg as that much electricity and ectoplasm forced its way into your body… What would have happened?"
"I could have…?" Danny breathed out as he watched the figure start moving again, untangling itself from the chords, and then tripping again against the uneven bottom of the chamber, one hand reaching out as the startled Danny fell against the wall, tripping the switch and lighting up the basement lab in brilliant green energy.
He waited for the figure to return as the glare faded to show Sam and Tucker, huddled against a wall, their faced buried in their arms lifting, tear streaked now. And he waited. And he waited more. Finally it dawned on Danny that the younger him wasn't going to come back out, and it must have hit the Sam and Tucker in the past because they were terrified and screaming fro help.
Help came, his parents, then paramedics, and then someone finally fished him out form inside the portal, a wretched scorched black figured that crumpled pitifully on the white sheets of the gurney that paramedics has manhandled down the stairs. An oxygen mask, an IV, this, that and the other run into him, attached to him, meant to save but doing nothing.
"I… died?" he finally asked.
Clockwork waited a moment, focusing his considerable power on retaining the figure that was most comfortable for the halfa before he made the boy's worst fears half a reality. "Elsewhen," he finally said softly, his staff waving across the portal so that it showed a hospital, then the interior, a hall, and then a room where a still badly burned boy lay under an oxygen tent, tubes and machines hooked to him as he fought for his life.
Danny was quiet for a long time as the picture stayed, showing friends, family, even enemies wander through it in their grief at the all too likely death of one Danny Fenton. Then finally he breathed in and offered a very quiet, very hesitant, "How?"
"Very slowly. Very painfully." He stopped, pressed the button on his staff and stopped time inside the portal as he turned to Danny, a sincere look of regret on his face. "You must understand, Danny, that you had just as much of a chance of gaining ghost powers as you did dying. The window in which the ectoplasm could properly bond with your DNA at the molecular level… It was very tiny. And increased by the grounding, however unintentional."
"I look like I'm hurting," Danny whispered, eyes glued to the dying boy in it. "Why aren't they doing anything about it?"
"Because they can't," Clockwork said gently, one hand reaching out to grasp the boy's shoulder. "This is the result of electrocution, yes, but it is also the result of ectoplasm trying to force its way into your very genetic makeup. And since it can't…"
"It's destroying me one cell at a time."
"You held on for weeks before you finally succumbed to it. Twenty-seven days, exactly, before your body could no longer support life," and Danny fancied he heard some measure of respect in Clockwork's tone as he said that. "Even without your powers, you were always an exceptional boy. You only needed to realize it.
The picture played again, at rapid speed past his death, his friends and family saying goodbye, his funeral, until the picture suddenly blanked out and settled on another random scene, this time of the ocean and a pod of whales swimming and sounding. Danny clenched a hand to his chest, wondering at how much it hurt to have watched himself die in an alternate timeline.
"It could have been like that? Instead of like this?" he finally asked.
"Yes," was all Clockwork could say.
"So instead of dying I'm granted ghost powers, just so that I can die a couple of years later?" he asked, a bitter edge to his voice as he frowned, blue eyes flashing sparks as he rubbed them in exasperation. "And what is up with this?" he yelled in frustration. "I've got no control over them. I'm shooting sparks!"
Clockwork chuckled as he finally unleashed his own power, flickering rapidly through several changes before settling in as the infant form of himself. "You have enough control that you don't actually shoot ectofire from your eyes."
"I can do that?" Danny asked, startled.
"You can do many things, Danny Fenton. Most of which you would never have guessed before your death."
Danny glanced down at his hands, letting go and feeling the power dance across them in flickering blue flame as he clenched them into fists. "But they're so strong. So different."
"And yet," Clockwork murmured as he let his staff go to float behind him, reaching out to Danny's hands and holding them, turning them over so that the fire danced on his palms, "they are fundamentally the same. Look here," he instructed, and Danny did, staring at the energy as it rippled across his palms until his concentration dulled it to a bright glow, exactly like what he'd carried so many times when he was alive, only differing in color.
"Whoa," he said, and the concentration was broken, ectoenergy flaring up as fire again. "So it's a new power?" he asked.
"It's realized potential, Danny," Clockwork said as he let Danny's hands go, shifting back into his ancient state as he reached for the time staff he knew would be directly to his left. "Or perhaps I should say that it was there all along, you always had this power, but your human half ruled it."
"I don't understand," Danny muttered as he put his flaming hands out and crossed his arms. "I know I'm not exactly the most brilliant guy, but you're being cryptic."
"Perhaps you should listen," Clockwork murmured as he turned away and the portal lit back up, this time with a more than familiar image of Danny Phantom, the halfa that was half alive and not all dead, fighting Skulker, one of his most persistent adversaries. "Or perhaps it would be better if you watched."
Not that Danny needed to watch to remember this particular fight. It had happened maybe two weeks before his sixteenth birthday, just two months shy of his death, and it had been the night that he realized how much he cared about Sam Manson. And how quickly he would be willing to sacrifice anything, everything, himself, his town, the very world, if it meant she had even one more moment's worth of time to grace the face of the planet.
Oh, he remembered it well. Skulker had had him on the ropes, so to speak, was giving him a fairly good and thorough beating, when Sam had flung a rock at the back of his battle suit while Tucker tried desperately to hack into the system with a malfunctioning PDA, courtesy of a trip into the park's fountain at the beginning of the fight.
Skulker had turned, was turning to Sam, one of his wrist held weapons powering up and aimed at… Sam. And then Danny had done something… And then Danny had started burning. Danny stared at the Danny that was, eyes wide as he realized that the burning halfa phenomenon had happened while he was alive. Because it had, glaring green flames licked at the tree Skulker had him pinned up against, ate along the metal of Skulker's battle suit as Danny-that-was screamed Sam's name and brought a double fisted ectoblast up to fire into Skulker's chest, blasting a gaping whole through it so that nothing remained but a pair of tiny, dangling green legs.
The screen flickered out, again moving to some random natural occurrence, waves splashing against the pillars of a dock somewhere along an ocean, barnacles crusting the aging wood, and then back to the aftermath of the battle for a moment. But Danny didn't really need the screen to know what happened after that. Tucker sucking up the imprecation screaming blob that was Skulker's true form, and Danny kneeling beside the pale and mostly unconscious Sam, ghostly flames still tracing their way up his arms, across his shoulders, and out of his eyes.
He'd been on fire, and neither of his friends had said a word.
"It wasn't the first time I'd done that, was it?" he asked, feeling very small as he watched the portal return to the dock, the ocean, the rhythmic and soothing sounds of waves lapping against a shoreline.
"No. It wasn't."
"I still don't understand."
Clockwork sighed, very nearly amused. Danny had been absolutely correct when he said there was no other way. The boy did like to have everything spelled out to him, especially when he was frightened and confused, as he had been so often since gaining his ghost powers. He couldn't begrudge the child the explanation because he was too distraught to find the answers on his own, not after everything that had happened to him in the last night, day, and several weeks.
"The easiest explanation is that you could access your power readily when your emotionally involved. The more so, the more easily. And after you died…" A way to put it delicately did not exist, though Clockwork still tried to find one. Telling a boy, a sixteen year old child, no matter what he had accomplished, that his humanity had died the moment he had, was not an easy or desirable task.
"You access it so easily now, Danny, because you are wholly ghost. You have no humanity to balance the inhumanity of your ghost half. Nothing to tamp it down, control the ability other than your own willpower."
"So I could have done this all along?" he asked, once again letting rippling fire consume his hands, and then race up his arms to dance across his shoulders, his face, his hair.
"Once your body adjusted to the molecular change, learned to cope with the energy demands… Yes." A simple answer, an easy answer. And probably the best, since the first answer was almost always, invariably correct.
The flames died down and Danny sank to the floor, knees pulling up to his chest as he dropped his face against them, hiding his face from Clockwork no matter that he knew the ghost knew he was crying. He knew that even if he hadn't hid it, the older ghost would still have known he was, and why. Because if he'd used every aspect of his ghost powers, he might very well have been alive.
But there was really only one way to know for sure. And hadn't he come to ask
"Clockwork?" he asked, lifting his damp face from his knees and staring up at the other ghost as he made one of the chilling changes from ancient to middle aged. "Was there something I could have done? Something I could have changed, and lived? I could have been happy?"
"Danny," Clockwork said gently, and with a not ungentle smile on his face. "You're not asking the right questions."
"The right…? Oh, great with the cryptic wit," Danny muttered, scrubbing a gloved hand through his hair in annoyance. All he wanted to know was what his life would have been like if he'd lived, and surely the Master of Time could have taken a look in his little looking glass and told him. After all, he'd been the one to say that time was like a parade for him, and he…
Danny's entire body tensed and blue eyes raised themselves to the Time Master's implacable stare.
I see the parade from above, with all the twists and turns that it might, or might now, take.
With some difficulty Danny pulled himself up to his feet, his knees—dead or no—somewhat unsteady and very reluctant to hold him up, until he finally gave up and let his body drift a few inches above the floor like the other ghost. Danny knew he wasn't the brightest kid, he'd admitted as much to Clockwork already. But there really was no other explanation for what Clockwork had said. And a smile began to break across his somber face as he realized exactly what the Time Master was saying.
It's not over yet.
"Clockwork?" Danny finally asked, his voice much steadier than the last time he had said the name. "Is there still a twist that I can take?"
Clockwork smiled, one hand gripping the staff tighter, the other reaching out to squeeze Danny's shoulder. "Better. Much better."